I want kids engaged in creative, joyful learning. I wouldn't mind if they knew a little grammar too!

Friday, February 1, 2013

The Ten Commandments: A Revolutionary Concept

What has been so compelling about the
Ten Commandments? Why are they the cornerstone of Western civilization and
American life? Are they anymore?

First, we contemplated the idea of natural morality and wondered whether it exists. We used these excerpts from "The Moral Life of Babies" to do so:

Source A:

Psychologist Paul Bloom on Baby Morality

Like many scientists and
humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of
babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting
topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental
questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and
cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. . . .

A growing body of evidence . .
. suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of
life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral
thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some
sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that
parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their
interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is
critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a
sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they
naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it
to be.

Baby morality experiments

Our experiments involved having
children watch animated movies of geometrical characters with faces. In one, a
red ball would try to go up a hill. On some attempts, a yellow square got
behind the ball and gently nudged it upward; in others, a green triangle got in
front of it and pushed it down. We were interested in babies’ expectations
about the ball’s attitudes — what would the baby expect the ball to make of the
character who helped it and the one who hindered it? To find out, we then
showed the babies additional movies in which the ball either approached the
square or the triangle. When the ball approached the triangle (the hinderer),
both 9- and 12-month-olds looked longer than they did when the ball approached
the square (the helper). This was consistent with the interpretation that the
former action surprised them; they expected the ball to approach the helper. A
later study, using somewhat different stimuli, replicated the finding with
10-month-olds, but found that 6-month-olds seem to have no expectations at all.
(This effect is robust only when the animated characters have faces; when they
are simple faceless figures, it is apparently harder for babies to interpret
what they are seeing as a social interaction.)

This experiment was designed to
explore babies’ expectations about social interactions, not their moral
capacities per se. But if you look at the movies, it’s clear that, at least to
adult eyes, there is some latent moral content to the situation: the triangle
is kind of a jerk; the square is a sweetheart. So we set out to investigate
whether babies make the same judgments about the characters that adults do.
Forget about how babies expect the ball to act toward the other characters;
what do babies themselves think about the square and the triangle? Do they
prefer the good guy and dislike the bad guy?

In one of our first studies of
moral evaluation, we decided not to use two-dimensional animated movies but
rather a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects,
manipulated like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations: a yellow
square would help the circle up the hill; a red triangle would push it down.
After showing the babies the scene, the experimenter placed the helper and the
hinderer on a tray and brought them to the child. In this instance, we opted to
record not the babies’ looking time but rather which character they reached
for, on the theory that what a baby reaches for is a reliable indicator of what
a baby wants. In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants
overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual.
This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for
the good guy.

Does our research show that
babies believe that the helpful character isgood and
the hindering character isbad? Not necessarily. All that we can safely infer
from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an
aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is that these preferences are
based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was
helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is
preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that
adults would describe as nice or mean. When we showed these scenes to much
older kids — 18-month-olds — and asked them, “Who was nice? Who was good?” and
“Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded as adults would, identifying the
helper as nice and the hinderer as mean.

So are babies moral?

A fully developed morality is
the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight
and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not
merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that
when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in
which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where
all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the
get-go. The biologistRichard Dawkinswas
right, then, when he said at the start of his book “The Selfish Gene,” “Be
warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals
cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect
little help from biological nature.” Or as a character in the Kingsley Amis
novel “One Fat Englishman” puts it, “It was no wonder that people were so
horrible when they started life as children.”

Morality, then, is a synthesis
of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the
invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and
willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut
responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we
didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral
agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as
babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that
make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can
aspire to.

5 And the LORD saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the
thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Putting the Bible into its historical, political and social context helped us then see the differences between the law codes in the ancient world and in the Bible.

Source D: Social Justice in the Ancient World

Mesopotamia was very interested
in kittum, truth and right, and mesarum, equity and justice.

Fun fact: Hammurabi’s laws are
not categorized in ways that would be familiar to modern man. Many rules were
grouped together because they contained the same words and therefore created
phonetic flow when being recited.

The law code of Hammurabi
contains almost 300 laws written in over 3500 cuneiform characters. Hammurabi’s
is one law code that survives from the ancient world, and its most famous one.
Other law codes include the laws of Ur Nammu, the laws of Eshnunna, the laws of
Lipit-Ishtar, Hittite laws, and Middle Assyrian laws. It wasn’t until Solon in
Greece over 1000 years later that a ruler really codifies a list of written
laws for his people.

A major contrast between ancient
Near Eastern thought and Israelite conception of law is that Mesopotamians felt
there was a law beyond the gods. Just as Hammurabi was given laws and just ways
from Shamash, at some time Shamash had received them from some higher source.
This is not so in Israel. God makes laws, laws are derived from Him and there
is nothing beyond Him.

We also noted that in the pagan world there is no unity in heaven. There is chaos, war, love, betrayal of love and friendship, just as there is on earth. The gods don’t provide a model of justice and morality for humanity.

Source E: Mischievousness of the Gods

Anzu, the bird-man god, steals
the tablet of fates from Ea, the water god, who can be identified by the
streams of water running out of his shoulders. In other words, the gods can
create mischief for each other.

Furthermore, in the pagan world the gods are in charge of all manner of areas God in the Bible does not concern himself with.

22 And Zillah, she also bore
Tubal-cain, the forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron; and the
sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

Laws from the Code of Hammurabi have been accused of being primitive, barbaric. However, the "eye for an eye" law actually shows that the Babylonians conceived of a world where monetary payment could not replace certain types of damages. In other words, Hammurabi's laws are the precursor to the high value Western civilization places on human life.

Despite that advancement, Hammurabi's laws fall short in extending this value to all humans. Hammurabi and the civilizations of the ancient world were hierarchical. A commoner's or slave's eye was not the same as the eye of an aristocrat.

Source G: Laws from the Code of Hammurabi

These are the famous “eye for an eye” laws in
Hammurabi. What kind of society do the laws reveal?

Of course, in Egypt, the land from which God rescued the Israelites, slavery and mistreatment of slaves and foreigners was commonplace.

Here Ramses II is shown smiting
captured slaves: a Libyan, a Nubian and a Syrian.

Now we can appreciate just how revolutionary the Ten Commandments were: God is One, and the Source of Law is unified, consistent and clear. There is none of the confusion and chaos of competing and conflicting Gods. Moreover, God frees the Israelites -- which He mentions in the Ten Commandments in Deutoronomy -- not to enslave them once again as His people, but to offer them a covenant which they have the freedom to accept or reject. The law of the Sabbath in particular shows the democratic nature of the new social contract God wants to enact with the Israelites. Everyone -- man, woman, child, slave, even beast -- enjoys the rest of the Sabbath. Compare the language of the Ten Commandments with the facts we've learned about the pagan world, and then see what Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks says about this week's Torah portion, Yitro:

4 thou shalt not bow down
unto them, nor serve them; for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate Me;

הוְעֹשֶׂה חֶסֶד, לַאֲלָפִים--לְאֹהֲבַי, וּלְשֹׁמְרֵי
מִצְו‍ֹתָי. {ס}

5 and showing mercy unto
the thousandth generation of them that love Me and keep My commandments. {S}

8 Thou shalt not bow down
unto them, nor serve them; for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the third and upon
the fourth generation of them that hate Me,

13 but the seventh day is a
sabbath unto the LORD thy God, in it thou shalt not do any manner of work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy
maid-servant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy
stranger that is within thy gates; that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant
may rest as well as thou.

14 And thou shalt remember
that thou was a servant in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God brought
thee out thence by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the
LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day. {S}

17 Neither shalt thou covet
thy neighbour's wife; {S} neither shalt thou desire thy
neighbour's house, his field, or his man-servant, or his maid-servant, his
ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's. {S}

Note the difference in the Shabbat
commandment between the two versions of the Ten Commandments. The one in Deuteronomy reminds us that God took the Israelites out of Egypt in order to establish a new type of society.

Source K: Of course, I never miss an
opportunity to quote Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

At Sinai a new kind of nation was being formed
and a new kind of society – one that would be an antithesis of Egypt in which
the few had power and the many were enslaved. At Sinai, the children of Israel
ceased to be a group of individuals and became, for the first time, a body
politic: a nation of citizens under the sovereignty of G-d whose written
constitution was the Torah and whose mission was to be “a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation.”

Even today, standard works on the history of political thought trace
it back, through Marx, Rousseau and Hobbes to Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s
Politics and the Greek city state (Athens in particular) of the fourth century
BCE. This is a serious error. To be sure, words like “democracy” (rule by the
people) are Greek in origin. The Greeks were gifted at abstract nouns and
systematic thought. However, if we look at the “birth of the modern” – at
figures like Milton, Hobbes and Locke in England, and the founding fathers of
America – the book with which they were in dialogue was not Plato or Aristotle
but the Hebrew Bible. Hobbes quotes it 657 times in The Leviathan alone. Long
before the Greek philosophers, and far more profoundly, at Mount Sinai the
concept of a free society was born.

Three things about that moment
were to prove crucial. The first is that long before Israel entered the land
and acquired their own system of government (first by judges, later by kings),
they had entered into an overarching covenant with G-d. That covenant (brit Sinai) set moral
limits to the exercise of power. The code we call Torah established for the
first time the primacy of right over might. Any king who behaved contrarily to
Torah was acting ultra vires, and could be challenged. This is the single most
important fact about biblical politics.

Democracy on the Greek model
always had one fatal weakness. Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill
called it “the tyranny of the majority”. J. L. Talmon called it “totalitarian
democracy.” The rule of the majority contains no guarantee of the rights of
minorities. As Lord Acton rightly noted, it was this that led to the downfall
of Athens: “There was no law superior to that of the state. The lawgiver was
above the law.” In Judaism, by contrast, prophets were mandated to challenge
the authority of the king if he acted against the terms of the Torah.
Individuals were empowered to disobey illegal or immoral orders. For this alone, the covenant at Sinai
deserves to be seen as the single greatest step in the long road to a free
society.

The second key element lies in
the prologue to the covenant. G-d tells Moses: “This is what you are to say to
the house of Jacob and tell the people of Israel. ‘You yourselves have seen
what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to
Me. Now, if you obey Me fully and keep My covenant, you will be My treasured
possession, for the whole earth is Mine. You will be for Me a kingdom of
priests and a holy nation . . .’” Moses tells this to the people, who reply:
“We will do everything the Lord has said.”

What is the significance of
this exchange? It means that until the people had signified their consent, the
revelation could not proceed. There is
no legitimate government without the consent of the governed, even if the governor is Creator of heaven
and earth. I know of few more radical ideas anywhere. To be sure, there
were sages in the Talmudic period who questioned whether the acceptance of the
covenant at Sinai was completely free. However, at the heart of Judaism is the idea – way ahead of its time, and not
always fully realised – that the free G-d desires the free worship of free
human beings. G-d, said the rabbis, does not act tyrannically with His
creatures.

The third, equally ahead of its
time, was that the partners to the covenant were to be “all the people” – men,
women and children. This fact is emphasised later on in the Torah in the
mitzvah of Hakhel, the septennial covenant renewal ceremony. The Torah states
specifically that the entire people is to be gathered together for this ceremony,
“men, women and children.” A thousand years later, when Athens experimented
with democracy, only a limited section of society had political rights. Women,
children, slaves and foreigners were excluded. In Britain, women did not get
the vote until the twentieth century. According to the sages, when G-d was
about to give the Torah at Sinai, He told Moses to consult first with the women
and only then with the men (“thus shall you say to the house of Jacob” – this
means, the women ). The Torah, Israel’s “constitution of liberty”, includes
everyone. It is the first moment, by thousands of years, that citizenship is
conceived as being universal.

There is much else to be said
about the political theory of the Torah (see myThe
Politics of Hope,The
Dignity of Difference, andThe
Chief Rabbi’s Haggadahas well as the important works by Daniel Elazar and
Michael Walzer). But one thing is clear.
With the revelation at Sinai something unprecedented entered the human horizon.
It would take centuries, millennia, before its full implications were
understood. Abraham Lincoln said it best when he spoke of “a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.” At Sinai, the politics of freedom was born.

The biologistRichard Dawkinswas right, then, when he said at the start of his book “The Selfish Gene,” “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”

If that is so, then we need to turn to other codes to establish for us a just and right society. In studying closely the text of the Torah, we can see why it captured the attention of the Founding Fathers as they sought to create a new type of government and why it offers us as Jews a way to conceive of a democratic world that cares for its citizens and offers them, not a bleak, Hobbesian existence, but a noble and dignified one where morality, not selfishness, are developed and admired. Shabbat shalom.

About Me

I'm Chief Academic Officer at Magen David High School in Brooklyn, NY and an advocate of passion-based learning. I co-Founded and am Director of the I.D.E.A. Schools Network, which helps Jewish and independent schools implement project-based learning and educational innovation. Check out our website at ideaschoolsnetwork.com, and watch my ELI Talk on passion-based learning at http://elitalks.org/why-we-need-passion-based-learning-jewish-education!